The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Phuc found English harder than any subject she had encountered. She could not follow the teacher’s lectures well enough to take notes and always had to borrow and copy the notes of fellow students. For extra practice, she purchased the school’s tapes and played them on a used Panasonic cassette player bought on the black market. For every hour fellow students studied, she had to put in two. Frustratingly, she could study no more than one hour without bringing on the familiar headaches and dizziness. Her marks were disappointing.

  And still, Tam held the upper hand, continuing to bring her back to Tay Ninh for interviews. The unspoken tension between them kept taut the lie that she was a medical student in Ho Chi Minh City. He needed her, and she herself was not going to “make noise” and invite the unpredictability of further punishment or vengeance.

  The pace of interviews did not abate; it intensified. To capitalize on the continuing interest of the international media in the “decade after” stories, Hanoi hosted an international medical conference on the effects of Agent Orange, which brought yet more journalists Tam’s way. In addition to interviewing Phuc, they would view films showing vast forests of the province denuded by American herbicides during the war. Afterwards, Tam would show them a display of large jars of pickled fetuses, typically missing mouths or chins.

  One driver taking Phuc to Tay Ninh passed on office gossip that, clearly, he relished. Talk was that Western news media had reported that the Kim Phuc the Vietnamese government was showing off was fake: “They say the real one is in California.”

  “What?” Kim was astonished.

  “But Tam knows he has the real Kim Phuc,” the driver said. “He says you have the scars to prove it.” That spring, the government’s Vietnam News Agency issued the statement that, contrary to “sensation-mongering Western newspapers,” Kim Phuc was indeed a student in Vietnam. It quoted her: “I am studying medicine because I wish nobody ever has to endure what I have endured.”

  Vietnamese journalists were finding their own way to Phuc, and in increasing numbers. They did not have to seek prior approval from the foreign ministry and were able to bypass Tam in Tay Ninh. Just as the regime was easing its controls on the state-run economy, so too was its government-controlled media experimenting with ways to convey the official line other than by regurgitating turgid Party policies and directives. Vietnamese journalists saw in Kim Phuc a genre of story new to them: “human interest.” One Hanoi-based photographer took Phuc to a government day-care center to photograph her there. He explained why: “The war against the Americans almost destroyed you. They tried to kill you with the bomb, but you did not die. So now we will photograph you with children, to show you embracing life again.” Phuc looked for and picked up a cute baby. One year later, the photograph would win an international prize, and it was subsequently much reproduced in Hanoi, with the caption: “A decade later: Kim Phuc and her baby daughter.”

  Phuc, with idle days, had nothing to keep her from interviews in Tay Ninh. That spring, there was one visit from foreigners that she rather enjoyed. Dutch television came for several days to film a documentary. Phuc—surrounded by film crew, interpreters and minders—was its star. She was ferried between Tay Ninh and Trang Bang to film on location: at the noodle shop, at the temple, on the highway where she had been struck by the napalm bomb. Phuc went along with the dramatization: yet again she bared her burned back to “her” doctor and played the role of a medical student. As Tam ordered, she donned a white blouse, the uniform of girls attending a nursing school in Tay Ninh. “Give it back to me at the end of the day,” he told her. The cameras rolled while Phuc, sitting with “fellow medical students” at a long table, listened attentively and took notes on a lecture about the spinal column. She thought bitterly how she’d already learned that and more in her anatomy course at medical college. Nonetheless, on the last afternoon of the last day of the shoot, Phuc lost herself enjoying the sunset. As the red sun was about to drop from the sky, she felt relaxed enough with the cameraman to convey a request through the interpreter: “Oh, can he shoot that please?”

  One year later, the Dutch film would win two second prizes at international film festivals, one in the category of short film documentary at Leipzig, and another for reportage at an important annual television festival in Monte Carlo. The Dutch journalists were credited with being the first to discover Kim Phuc after years of obscurity.

  PERRY KRETZ’S SECOND POSTWAR TRIP TO Vietnam was finally underway. After the usual four-month wait to get Hanoi to approve his journalist’s visa, in early 1983, he was in Tay Ninh to fulfill his personal mission.

  “Kim! Jee-sus Christ!” He held his arms open. The girl walking towards him could not help but walk into them. He hugged her and, in the European style, kissed her on both cheeks. With no idea who this well-tanned, gray-haired “American” was, Phuc heard him tell of their meeting ten years earlier. The story of Kretz being under house arrest awaiting expulsion in two days, and making the trip to Trang Bang in pursuit of her story, when translated into Vietnamese, turned into him coming to Trang Bang to see her one last time at war’s end to say goodbye as he’d “never been able to forget her.”

  Only as he flipped through a stack of large black-and-white photographs that he’d brought along did Phuc begin to realize who this journalist might be. Each was of her, and each was taken in Trang Bang: at the house, in the hammock with her cousins at her feet, a book in hand—she recalled it had been a gift from a nurse at the Barsky—perched on a stool doing schoolwork, catching a ball outside. There were others, taken at the temple and on the highway.

  “Do you remember me?” Kretz asked.

  “A little,” she replied. She had a fleeting image of him insisting that her grandmother shake his hand, ignoring the fact that hers were soapy from washing clothes. As far as she could recall, this man named Perry Kretz was the only journalist, foreign or Vietnamese, to have visited her after the napalm attack. In fact, there had been many; Carl Robinson had come several times, and so had Nick Ut, the “Uncle Ut” whom her parents had spoken of as kindly.

  Suddenly, Phuc understood. This was the German journalist who had sparked Thach’s year-long search for her. Without thought or recrimination for the way her life had subsequently been turned upside down, she registered only that this person was someone who cared enough to come back to see her, though ten years had passed.

  “How are you, Kim?” he kept asking, adding, “I feel like a father to you.” Before he left, he made sure to give her his business card. It was the only one from a visiting journalist that she would keep.

  During the visit, Phuc repeated the lie that she was a medical student in Ho Chi Minh City, and acted the part of a happy, twenty-year-old woman, though still bothered with pain and headaches from her napalm wound. Throughout, a discordant soundtrack ran in her mind: They took my schooling away. This is a lie!

  BACK IN HAMBURG AT STERN, KRETZ FILED A story from Vietnam, but wrote nothing of his visit with Kim Phuc. He had come home troubled. While other foreigners might have seen a typical Vietnamese schoolgirl, one with an irresistible smile, he had detected an awkward stiffness in her posture and carriage, and a decided unhappiness in her expression.

  Kretz took his pictures of Phuc to the Oggersheim clinic, a renowned West German accident and burn clinic in Ludwigshafen, whose most famous former patient was Niki Lauda, the Austrian Formula One racing car driver and then reigning world champion who had been taken there after a fiery crash in Nürburgring in 1976. Kretz spoke with Professor Rudolf Zellner, the plastic surgeon who headed the clinic, a teaching unit affiliated with Heidelberg University. Kretz asked: could he give advice on Western medicines that could be sent to her? Zellner was unequivocal: nothing could be done from afar, a burn victim had to be examined firsthand. “This is a chance to help,” Kretz told his wife, “and I’m going to grab it.” Even as he had been meeting with Kim Phuc, he’d made up his mind. He’d said nothing then; no sense getting anyone’s hopes up, as much d
epended on getting the cooperation of the Vietnamese.

  THE YEAR 1983 MARKED THE START OF A LONG, irreversible slide in the fortunes of Nu’s noodle shop. After two and a half years of liberalized economic reforms in Vietnam, the inevitable backlash came from the orthodox among the Communist leadership. Hanoi put the brakes on reform and curbed the resurgence of private trading, which it regarded as “capitalistic excess.” It targeted “non-essential businesses” like cloth merchants and restaurateurs with harsh taxes, as high as 90 percent of revenues, in hopes of forcing them to shut down. Whenever Nu could not meet her monthly tax bill, the tax official slapped a sticker on the shop door, barring the business from opening until arrears were paid. Many owners in that predicament lost their businesses to the state, as it hoped they would.

  Nu blamed her woes on the location of the district tax office. As it was directly opposite, it enabled the cadre to claim he could keep an exact count of her customers, right down to the bowls of soup served. Nu bemoaned the state’s onetime takeover of her shop, allowing him to also claim knowledge of her margins of profit. Phuc saw Tam’s vindictiveness in the waning income from the shop. She said nothing, humbled by her mother’s capacity to endure suffering. She pays for me without question, she told herself, as she picked up another weekly packet of food and money.

  That fall, as her former classmates in medical college started their second year, Phuc could think only of the sham that her life had become compared to theirs. She had avoided them, so as not to be tormented with envy. One exception was Trieu, who would invite her out for an ice cream. But she found she now had little in common with her lighthearted friend. Rapidly, Phuc slid deeper and deeper into unhappiness until she was mired in a severe depression.

  When speaking to journalists, Phuc stepped into the spotlight and played the part of the happy student, the life she wanted; when they departed, she was left in darkness, with the life that had been forced on her. On the bus back from Tay Ninh, she railed in silence: They have destroyed my life. Why do they do this to me? Why? Phuc found solace the only way she knew how, by turning inward to her Caodai faith. She accepted that whatever wrongs she had committed in her past lives had not yet been atoned for, not even by the pain and suffering inflicted by the napalm bomb. Caodai’s will was that she endure more. Seeing herself without a future, Phuc had but one wish for her day-to-day existence: to feel the happiness that was once so naturally part of her character. In her prayers, she bypassed the numerous gods, saints and spirits of the religion for the heavenly being of Caodai itself: “Please, please, bring me happiness.” Her despair grew only darker. Phuc was confused: I am a strong believer; why is nothing happening from my prayers? One day, on the bus back from Tay Ninh, her spirits at their lowest ebb, Phuc wept. I don’t want to live.

  She took to leaving the house by day. She did not want Loan to see her moping about. Her sister had enough worries; Loan had never got over the death of her first husband, and she and her second husband, whose own teenager, a daughter, was being raised by grandparents, were saddened that they had been unable to have children together. As well, family relationships were strained, what with Loan’s teenage son recently returned from Danang to be reunited with his mother.

  Without much money to spend, Phuc had only limited ways to pass the time. One day, she wandered into the American War Crimes Museum. She saw on a wall the famous image of herself. She paused long enough to read the caption: it did not identify her. She felt an emptiness. Day by day, she narrowed the range of her footsteps, until eventually she did nothing but patrol the few blocks around the house. But one day she came upon a library, and for the first time in months she felt motivated to find something to keep her mind active. She pulled from a section on world religions—as yet untouched by state censorship, though not for long—a book on Buddhism, another on Taoism, one on Hinduism, and she went through them one at a time.

  It was a copy of the New Testament of the Christian Bible that absorbed her attention. The novelty of the questions in her mind kept Phuc coming back day after day—she could read for no more than an hour without tiring. Surprised at first, she soon came to feel affronted. The Bible’s contradictions with Caodai rankled: why did the Bible say that God had delivered meat—“beast, fowl and fish”—for man to eat? Caodai said eating meat was dirty; she had become a vegetarian to purify herself! The Bible said Jesus died and rose again. Caodai said Jesus had been reborn in its pope, the Ho Phap. Since the Ho Phap was dead, could Jesus be reborn again? She read on. She reeled at what she regarded as the Bible’s most ludicrous claim: that Jesus Christ could pay for one’s sins, that going to heaven could be a certainty. Phuc was offended: how could they say that? By her Caodai beliefs, if she died tomorrow, she would not necessarily go to heaven.

  BY COINCIDENCE, ABOUT THIS TIME, A HANDSOME young man who was an assistant pastor at a Christian church round the corner from Loan’s became a regular visitor. A relation of Loan’s first husband, Anh was five or six years older than Phuc. His visits became daily when Loan’s teenage son was hospitalized for an operation. Knowing Phuc’s days to be idle—except when she was in Tay Ninh—he invited her to accompany him to the hospital to provide the boy’s nursing care. The two addressed each other in the familial way, as brother and sister.

  During hours of chat in ten days of going to the hospital, the two discovered and appreciated their similarity of temperament. Both believed in a quiet life and were uninterested in what others their age did—going out at night looking for entertainment, smoking, drinking. It was some days before Anh himself brought up religion. Religious belief was a subject one raised only in trusted company. Contrary to what she had been told by Loan, Anh was not of the “different” religion, but the “new and good” religion; the former was how the Vietnamese referred to Catholicism, the latter a reference to the Christian Church of Vietnam. Anh asked Phuc if she read the Bible, and did she believe in Jesus Christ? Phuc blurted out: “Oh! I have lots of questions!”

  He brought her a Bible as a present, and they read it together. Their daily discussions centered on its teachings, and in particular on whether Jesus could atone for a man’s sins. Phuc held to her Caodai belief that one had to pay for one’s own sins, that atonement came only through suffering, penitence and good deeds, and worship of the spirits of ancestors and saints and gods in hopes of appealing to their benevolence and avoiding their wrath. Anh said the gospel of the Bible had simpler truths: “Before God, a man is only a man, nothing more, nothing less. God gives you salvation as a gift. You don’t have to do good things to earn it; you can’t earn it. No matter what you do, God will save you.”

  They both held resolutely to their beliefs. Anh preached that God sent Jesus Christ to save the world, and that he took to the cross the sins of all. “Those that do not follow Jesus Christ,” he said, “will spend their afterlife in hell.”

  “I cannot believe that,” replied Phuc.

  “I invite you to hear my pastor’s sermon.”

  Phuc was firm. “Impossible,” she said. “I cannot go. If I betray my religion, my soul will wander with no resting place. Heaven has no room for followers who betray Caodai.”

  “If you are not ready to go to church, why don’t you try praying to God? Bring your burdens to God, see how you feel.”

  Phuc confided to Loan that her fervent prayers to Caodai were going unanswered. She asked her opinion about Anh’s suggestion that she pray to the God from the West. Her sister saw no dilemma. “His religion is from the West, but you are unhappy,” she said. “Why not try something else?” Phuc did so tentatively, deciding to give the Western God a test in her prayers: “I will go to visit Anh’s church, but I will be alone there. Can you show me a friend?”

  Some days later, she stood outside the small white flat-roofed building with the cross on top. The door was open. Phuc went in and stood at the back. I should not be here; I should be in a Caodai temple, she kept telling herself. There was a lone figure inside the church, a wom
an sitting in a middle pew. Mustering her courage, Phuc approached. “Hello,” she said softly. The middle-aged woman responded warmly. God has answered my prayer! Phuc’s heart swelled with happiness.

  The two women began to meet daily at the church to read the Bible together, to discuss its teachings and the truths to be found within it. After two weeks, Phuc was ready to attend Sunday services. Regularly, Anh inquired how she was feeling about the church and about Jesus Christ. She reiterated that she would attend his church but pray only to Caodai. In her newfound happiness, Phuc wondered if, for the first time in her life, she was falling in love. She asked Loan if Anh had a girlfriend and discovering that he did not, asked him shyly: “We can be boyfriend and girlfriend?” He replied gently: “My life is devoted to God.” Inspired, Phuc was ready to test God a second time. “Dear God,” she prayed, “my sorrow is too great and too heavy. I need help.”

  THE PASTOR WAS MID-SERMON. “THERE WAS a man who tried to do only good in his life . . .”

  That is me, thought Phuc.

  “Before God, this man is no different than any other man. Before God, everyone is a sinner. Each and every one of us has burdens to carry.”